Split second, p.4
Split Second, page 4
By the time her uninvited guest walked into the garage, she was as far away from the trunk as possible, kneeling down, with the glass of wine on the floor before her, still holding the thumb drive less than an inch above the red liquid.
“Get in the trunk and close it from the inside,” she ordered.
“No fucking way! You’ve lost your fucking mind!”
“I don’t think so. Because now I have your gun. So do what I say, or I’ll not only destroy the drive, but put enough holes in you to turn you into a sieve. I’ve been shooting since I was eight,” she lied. “My father was a cop,” she added, also a fabrication.
“You’d better hope I’m not the one who finds you,” he spat, and then lowered himself into the Acura’s trunk. Once inside, one of his arms reached up and found a way to lower the lid. Finally, there was a telltale click, indicating it was fully locked.
Jenna rushed outside to the car she had stolen on Palomar Mountain. The Acura was serving as a prison, and even if it weren’t, she felt safer taking a car that, at least for the moment, no one knew was connected to her.
She took the driver’s seat, shoved the flash drive into her pocket, and drank down the full glass of wine in one prolonged gulp, wishing for just a moment that she had the entire bottle with which to calm her raw, exposed nerves, and drown her sorrows.
6
Lee Cargill was bleary-eyed and pissed off. More than pissed off. Seething. Enraged.
He paced in a cavernous room filled with heavy equipment, part of a spacious facility that the Army Corps of Engineers had dug out under the peak of Palomar Mountain during the construction of the Hale Telescope in 1935, complete with meeting rooms and lodging. It had been constructed in parallel with the Hale Observatory so the construction work could go largely unnoticed.
God-dammit! fumed Cargill.
He loved the Palomar facility. It was ideally located near the top of a scenic mountain. Not only was the facility itself spacious and well laid out, but at night he and his people often ventured outside to enjoy the fresh air and a star field that blazed with an amazing light, which was the very reason it had been chosen to be the home of what had once been the most impressive telescope ever built.
But now everything had been blown to hell. “Fuck you, Edgar Knight!” he shouted to an empty room.
Just as Cargill’s shout finished reverberating around the walls, his second-in-command, Joe Allen, entered the room with an expression as grim as his own. “The third team we sent in has reported back,” he said.
“And?” barked Cargill impatiently.
“Almost everyone is dead. On both sides. Every member of our initial extraction team was killed. And every member of the teams we sent in response to their alarm. Only the helo pilot survived, and his bird was badly damaged. Luckily, he managed to get it out of there. Can you fucking imagine? If that thing had gone down, fire or no fire, we’d have a headache the size of Texas.”
“We already have that,” snapped Cargill. “But yes, it would have been even bigger.” He paused. “You’re certain no one else survived?”
“We think Jenna Morrison may have, but we aren’t positive. Some of the bodies were pretty unrecognizable.”
“Really?” shouted Cargill. “Wasn’t she the only female? That should be a big fucking clue, right?”
Joe Allen swallowed hard. “No female bodies found yet,” he said. “She could be alive, or she could be dead but not yet found. Maybe she was wounded and managed to leave the scene. We’re still combing the woods.”
“Recognize anyone on their side?”
“Not yet.”
“How do we know everyone from their side was killed?”
“We got counts of what the teams were up against, and the dead body count matches what we expected.”
“But in the heat of battle, who knows if one or more of the enemy was miscounted. So we can’t be sure none of them escaped. And we can’t be sure they don’t have Jenna Morrison.”
“True, but that won’t help them. Nathan Wexler and all traces of his work are gone. You could interrogate Einstein’s wife all you wanted, but you wouldn’t get any new insights into general relativity.”
“Thanks for that revelation, Joe. Because I didn’t know that. I’m that fucking stupid.” He shook his head, incensed. “This has to be the work of Edgar Knight. Has to be. To think I called that prick my friend. I can’t fucking wait until my next report to the president. We lost good men. Irreplaceable men. Knight should never have known about this base. He split off from us before we moved here, and I know he wasn’t aware this facility even existed, which is one of the reasons I chose it.”
“We have a mole. It’s the only explanation.”
“No kidding,” said Cargill. “One who must have been with us from the beginning. Biding his time. Knight knew we were here but figured a direct attack on this base would almost surely fail. He must have decided to keep his powder dry, to piggyback off of our superior intelligence capabilities and wait for us to discover something that would be a game-changer.”
Allen nodded. “Which we just did.”
“We were monitoring Wexler,” said Cargill in disgust, “and Knight was monitoring us.”
He turned away, his eyes blazing. “So now I can’t trust anyone, can I? How do I know you aren’t working for Edgar Knight for Christ’s sake?”
“Come on, Lee. We’ve known each other for too long. You know me. You know this isn’t true.”
Cargill’s features softened. “I know that, Joe. I do. But I’m frazzled. And I thought I knew everyone on this team. But apparently I don’t.”
“So what now?”
“We have to evacuate and find a new base. This base should be impregnable, and isn’t easy to sneak up on, so I doubt we’re in any immediate danger. But I’ll never underestimate Edgar Knight again.” Cargill scowled. “But, obviously, our first priority has to be rooting out the man, or men, who have infiltrated our organization. Until we do that, changing headquarters, or anything else we do for that matter, won’t mean shit.”
7
Jenna drove to La Jolla Country Day high school and parked in the center of its minotaur maze of buildings and connecting lots. Only a few cars were present anywhere, left there overnight for unknown reasons. It was now just after four in the morning.
She turned off the lights, shut her eyes, and struggled to come up with a plan of action. But her mind refused.
She had been exhausted after arriving home near midnight—two a.m. Chicago time—but it had now been almost twenty-four hours since she had last slept. Her body had produced rivers of adrenaline for the past several hours, but the effect was wearing off and she was crashing hard.
She almost melted into the seat of the car, waging a futile struggle to stay awake but drifting quickly into a fitful sleep. Her eyes shot open less than an hour later and she shook her head vigorously to bring herself fully back to consciousness.
But even this nap, short as it was, was a godsend, and she now found she was able to remain awake and concentrate once again. She didn’t need a full-length mirror to know she looked as though she had been through a war, which she had been, and was covered in cuts, bruises, and blood, most of it not her own.
So now what?
Think! she demanded of herself.
What should she do?
She decided to first take inventory. The only useful items in her wallet were two twenties, an ATM card, and a credit card, but she decided that she couldn’t risk using the credit card until she knew what she was up against.
Her own cell phone had been confiscated but she now had two others, one belonging to a chubby driver on Palomar Mountain and one to a man she had sealed in the trunk of her car.
And she had two guns. A compact submachine gun and a semi-automatic pistol.
First order of business, she decided, was to get more money. She drove to a nearby ATM and withdrew five hundred from savings, the maximum her bank would allow with one transaction. She then gassed up the car at a station that was open all night before returning to the high school parking lot to continue planning.
It was now nearly five thirty. The sun would be coming up in less than an hour. How soon before the owner of the car she was in managed to call in a report?
Should she beat him to the punch and go to the police herself? The men who had taken her and Nathan didn’t seem too troubled by the prospect of the local police being alerted that they were being abducted. The spokesman of the kidnapping squad had specifically said so, and she had believed him.
So did these men have the cops in their pockets?
She couldn’t rule it out. Whoever had taken them, and whoever had then tried to intervene with an ambush, were almost certainly in positions of power—or at least whoever was backing them was. Possibly even legitimate power. The kind of people who could have great influence with the police.
So going to the cops might be playing right into their hands. She imagined sitting in a station while a friendly detective left for a moment to get coffee, only to secretly alert her abductors that the woman they had been looking for had arrived, as they had anticipated.
She shuddered at the thought.
And even if the cops were clean, or couldn’t be influenced by either group, would she pull up to the station in a stolen car?
And if she did, what would she report?
If she told them the truth they would think she was a lunatic. They would never believe her story.
And for good reason. She didn’t believe her story either. And she had lived it.
She could produce the weapons and cell phones she had taken, but that might just suggest she was deranged and dangerous. This could work, but could just as easily backfire. Badly.
So what would happen if she told the truth, described her and Nathan’s abduction and subsequent events? If they didn’t take her a thousand percent seriously they might not get around to checking her house for some time. When they did, they’d either find a man in the trunk of her car, who surely would claim she was a madwoman who had assaulted him, or, if he had escaped, a home with no signs of forced entry, and aside from a dismantled computer, all jewelry and other valuables still there. No sign of any struggle. And no sign of Nathan.
So what then? They would tell her that she was free to file a missing persons report. That after forty-eight hours or so, if he didn’t turn up, they would begin to look into it.
There were other variations of this she could conceive. The carnage on Palomar could come to light, but even so Nathan wouldn’t be recognizable, and his phone and wallet weren’t on his corpse to identify him. And if the Hostess truck was found, federal agencies would push the local cops aside, anyway, shutting them out of the case.
If Palomar Mountain did come into play, how long before the driver she had accosted described the crazed commando woman who had threatened him with a submachine gun? Hell, if this were to happen she could well become the chief suspect in Nathan’s murder—when the authorities finally got around to figuring out that he was dead.
While all this was going on, the people working with trunk-man would be after her. And her identity and whereabouts would be logged into the police system, which she wouldn’t trust to protect her.
So best case nothing would happen for days.
Worst case, this would blow up in her face.
So the cops were definitely out. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized they would be out even if none of her reasoning were true, and they genuinely believed her and tried to help from the start.
Because they’d be hopelessly out of their league. Going to them would be like counting on a golden retriever puppy to protect her from a pack of wolves.
So where could she turn?
After several more minutes of thought, she came up with a way forward. Not great, but under the circumstances anything that wasn’t absolutely disastrous was inspired.
She would hire a private detective. The most bad-ass detective she could find. Those looking for her might easily manage to put out notices to police forces, having them be on the lookout for her and shaping reality in any way they saw fit.
But a private detective would be well out of this loop. Far safer. Far more anonymous.
But she couldn’t stay in La Jolla. That would be just asking for trouble.
In a flash of insight it became clear where she needed to go, and what she needed to do.
If she couldn’t immediately unlock the thumb drive, she could at least learn the gist of Nathan’s discovery. He had only told one person: Dan Walsh. In the e-mail that had almost certainly set this firestorm in motion.
But she would need to meet with Dan in person. She had to assume his phone and computer were bugged. She needed to know what he knew, and alert him to the probable danger he was in.
She decided she would recruit a private investigator first. One located in LA, and thus much closer to the UCLA campus and Nathan’s physicist friend.
It took thirty minutes of frantic searching through the Web, through dozens and dozens of agencies, but she finally found a man who seemed perfect for her needs, a man named Aaron Blake, and scoured his website for an additional five minutes.
He was a highly decorated ex-Army Ranger, seventy-fifth regiment, who had served within various counter-terrorism groups in Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq. Jenna Googled the 75th Ranger Regiment and learned this was an elite special operations force headquartered at Fort Benning, Georgia, and tasked with a variety of special operations missions.
Impressive, to say the least.
Only three months earlier, Blake had left the service and hung up his shingle in LA as a private investigator. He listed his qualifications, which were impressive, but most importantly to Jenna, he could handle himself in a gunfight and under extreme pressure, something that seemed likely given the events of the past six hours.
He couldn’t be more ideal for what she was looking for. Maybe her luck was beginning to change.
Finally with a plan in mind, Jenna Morrison took a deep breath, started her stolen car, and began the drive that would lead her to a face-to-face meeting with an ex-Army Ranger.
Now all she had to do was get him to believe her story.
8
Aaron Blake drummed the fingers of his left hand on his desk while he continued to read Internet primers on his monitor, instructing him on how to publicize his business, how to use social media effectively, and ten tips for enhanced search engine optimization, which would help his name rise to the top when anyone searched for a private investigator in LA.
He had a keen mind for detective work, which he had proven repeatedly in his past life in the military. He had always done very well in school, and was especially proud of his reasoning skills. He had a knack for asking the right question. For observation. For reconstructing complex histories from meager clues. His brothers-in-arms could not have been more complimentary of his skills in this regard.
But skills as a detective weren’t enough to launch a successful PI practice. Not if no one knew you existed. And until you built a reputation, no one would. And this required business and publicity skills, not detective skills.
If you were the best chess player in the world, you would eventually be recognized as such. You’d have to start at satellite tournaments, true, but if you kept beating others you’d soon take your place at the top of the pecking order.
But you could be the best writer, or the best accountant, or the best PI, and flounder forever if you didn’t know how to promote yourself. If only the PI world held tournaments, where practitioners of the art could compete against one another for glory and bragging rights.
Since this wasn’t possible, Blake knew it might take a long time for him to build a thriving practice. So he had begun by setting up office in his apartment, a tiny efficiency, not much bigger than an actual office would be. And while nothing reeked of small-time, of failure, more than being forced to work and sleep out of the same tiny residence, he had to start somewhere. And at least the apartment complex was in a respectable neighborhood and presented well, with rows of pricey but magnificent King Palms arrayed around the grounds, several pools, and a large fountain near the entry gate.
Plus, he was lucky that his resumé spoke for itself, so the trappings of success weren’t as important as they would be in other businesses. He was counting on his background, and then his results, to keep him in demand until he could move to a real office.
So far almost all of his clients had been men and women wanting to catch their spouses in the act of cheating—or learn if any money was parked in offshore accounts during divorce proceedings.
Cheating spouse cases were not only boring, routine, and voyeuristic, they were painfully cliché. A few times he had taken on more interesting cases, but this was all too rare.
Once a wealthy suburbanite had been robbed of an heirloom, one of limited economic value but great personal value. When it became clear the police were going to do nothing about it, he had paid big money for Blake to investigate and catch the thief, which Blake did, in a display of detective work that would have impressed Sherlock Holmes.
Blake could only hope that as his reputation grew the number of interesting cases that came his way would rise dramatically. And he had finally managed to schedule some appointments with law firms in the area, which often needed investigatory work done in conjunction with certain cases. He had high hopes that offering his services free of charge, on a trial basis, until the lawyers were satisfied that he was as good as he said he was, would eventually pay big dividends.
But he desperately needed for this to happen quickly. Not because he cared about the money, but because there was nothing he hated more than inactivity, than boredom. He had become an adrenaline junkie in the military. He wasn’t a sadist. And he despised the necessity to kill. But if killing one man could save hundreds, Blake was able to make peace with this equation.
